A file system in a computer generally is part of the operating system that manages access to data in files stored on one or more storage devices. The file system provides an interface through which other applications can create and manage file system objects, write data to files and read data from files stored on the storage devices.
Most file systems are configured to provide a level of data integrity. For example, a file system may compute and store checksums of the stored data when the data is written to a storage device. When data is read from the storage device, the checksums can be computed for the data as read and compared to the stored checksums. There are variety of checksum algorithms, which vary in terms of efficiency, computational complexity and storage overhead.